Anonymous is out of its depth attacking Israel

Anonymous's attempts to take on the Israeli government over its attacks on Gaza appear to have failed.

After the Israeli Army started firing back at Hamas rocket attacks and clocking up civilian casualties, Anonymous declared war on Israel. Millions of attacks on government sites were recorded. According to the Times of Israel it appears that the Israeli government’s IT infrastructure was immune. Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz said that the Israeli cyber defences had held up against more than 44 million attacks.

Steinitz said that hackers had tried to disable the symbols of Israeli sovereignty, to enter web sites and install anti-Israel content, thus compromising information and data and damaging the government’s ability to serve the public. Top targets included the Prime Minister’s Office site, and security-related sites, such as that of the Home Front Command. Only one attack got through and a site went wobbly for a few minutes but quickly recovered.

Government sites were all fully backed up and mirrored, meaning that they could be replaced by a duplicate site instantly if the original site were compromised. The attacks appear to have come from IP addresses in the US and Europe, and not Arab countries and were simply DoS attacks.

Carmela Avner, the government’s chief information officer pointed out that none of the attacks were that serious. There had been few attempts to enter sites and steal data and most were just script kiddie stuff from amateurs. One of the reasons for the attack's failures has been because of moves to update software on the servers and bullet proof them. Anonymous appears to see that it is flogging a dead horse. Its #OpIsrael hashtag was dropped precipitously over the weekend.

So far they have only had success against web pages of private sites that presumably were not well protected.